[sdiy] MIDI isn't musical : Flame bait?

[Ian Fritz]

At 03:41 PM 1/15/2002, Don Tillman wrote:

>A 1/4-second slide over slide over 4 octaves of white notes (think
>Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis here) is an easy 128 notes per second.
>
>Now try this... go up to a keyboard, play a five note chord with each
>hand, then alternate playing them (high-chord, low-chord, high-chord)
>three chords a second, double it to 6 chords a second, 12, and even a
>rank amateur like myself can do 24 five note chords a second (sounds
>like a poor man's Ginastera piano concerto).  That's 120 notes per
>second also.
>
>So example 1 is a slide and example two is a pair of chords, both
>easy to play and both running 120 notes per second or so, or
>8mSec per note.  If MIDI could only handle 120 notes per second you'd
>have a trainwreck, the timing would be so grossly distorted that you
>couldn't tell the slide from the chords.
>
>An order of magnitude higher speed (0.8 mSec per note) will allow you
>to discern example 1 from example 2 pretty well, but wouldn't fool
>anybody and wouldn't address the performance subtleties of a more
>accomplished musician.  MIDI is about 1 mSec per note.
>
>An additional order of magnitude speed increase (0.08 mSec per note)
>is necessary for a keyboard performance that sounds more like a guy
>playing a keyboard than a bad protocol over a serial stream.
>
>Okay?

If you can really go that fast, OK. It sounds a bit high to me, but I don't 
play keyboards so I won't contradict you.